MDMD(2): Notes and Questions

[David Casseres]

Notes on Monte's notes on Andrew's notes:
>     
>>45.27  '... reduced to Certainty'... Compare this removal of choice 
>>with the fate of the preterite in GR or the Thanatoids in Vineland.
>
>And another echo he leaves it to us to catch: the way Obs are "reduced" to
>results, brushed and combed and ranked in an ephemeris.

Indeed, to this day sextant observations are "reduced" to find latitude 
and longitude in celestial navigation.  Incidentally, an ephemeris 
(unless I'm thinking of its friend the nautical almanac), at first glance 
appearing to be just a vast compilation of numbers, is kind of 
interesting structurally; when you use it, the procedure for finding the 
right numbers seems more complex than it ought to be; but after a while 
you realize that the book is arranged so oddly in order to exploit 
certain natural symmetries in the data, allowing a fourfold reduction 
(there's that word again) in the volume of numbers, pages, printing 
costs, etc.  The 18th-century mind at work.

>There's a quiet war
>going on among observational and computational techniques (e.g. Longitude
>by Lunar Culminations, 74.19, vs. Harrison's chronometry). cf. GR 726: the
>"quaint, brownwood-paneled Victorian kind of Brain War... between
>quaternions and vector analysis of the 1880s..."

When I read _Longitude_ it struck me as the struggle between Science and 
Technology, as we now call them.  By Maskelyne's time the astronomers 
were plainly more interested in what they were learning about the heavens 
through their observations than in the application of their catalogs to 
navigation.  And arguably, Harrison and the other watchmakers were at 
least as interested in the exercise of their art for its own sake as they 
were in longitude, though of course the prize money meant a lot to them.  
The Royal Society got blindsided; having invested heavily in the 
astronomers, they were so unprepared for Harrison's triumph that they 
managed to avoid for years giving him the money he had so obviously 
earned.



Cheers,
David